Under Parr

by Blair Babylon

  And every time, she thought if she died, she died, but what a way to go.

  His rough fingers dragging over the skin of her clit from her opening to the top of her folds spiraled her faster and faster, and it felt like every time he pounded into her, his cock went deeper.

  She was racing toward release. Every scrub of his fingers across her clit and savage slam into her from behind forced her body to clench, and she became a knot yanked at both ends as she tightened. Until with one hard pinch of his fingertips on her clit, she broke apart and unraveled, waves of ecstasy roaring through her. She was the nothingness between the frayed ends as she clung to the tree and Jericho dug his fingers into her hips once again, growling against her back as he trembled with his last thrusts.

  He gasped, his voice holding that desperate rasp that Tiffany had come to think of as him returning from unthinking instinct to being himself.

  Jericho grabbed her with both of his arms and held her as they both leaned against the tree. His breath was ragged as he pressed his lips to her temple and rumbled, his body hot against hers, “You just made every one of my fantasies come true.”

  “Not yet,” she said, still gulping air, too. “Let’s go finish that round of golf. I’m ahead by five strokes.”

  He groaned against her temple. “God, could you be any more perfect?”

  She played the rest of the round with damp panties and a sore pussy, and she beat Jericho by six strokes. He was two over, and she was four under par.

  Yeah, she’d been under Parr, all right.

  And she’d liked it.

  Only three more days until June started, though.

  But she wouldn’t have traded being Miss May for the world.

  Jericho grabbed her hand while the caddies were cleaning their golf clubs, and they were indeed white, college-age guys. “I’m starving. Let’s have lunch in the clubhouse. The lobster rolls here are great.”

  “Are they the mayonnaise kind?” There must be other items on the menu though. She could eat a salad.

  He shrugged. “I suppose they could make you a Maine roll if you wanted one, but the ones on our menu are Connecticut lobster rolls, warm buns with melted butter poured over them and cayenne pepper if you want it.”

  “Oh, that’s good,” she said. “I like the cayenne.”

  He grinned at her and grabbed her hand. “Homemade rolls, too. Come on.”

  He led her up the steps and into the long clubhouse, a sturdy New England construction flying nautical flags and notices from their sister club, the Narragansett Yacht Club, just down the street at the harbor.

  “There’s a yacht club, too?” she asked him.

  “Yeah,” Jericho said, squinting at the flyers on the corkboard. “My parents have a boat. I’m more into golf than boats.”

  Wow, golf and yachts. Yeah, Jericho came from money.

  Inside the glass double doors, which Jericho held open for Tiffany, the interior of the clubhouse opened up into a wide seating area with a fieldstone fireplace and a dining area with twenty or so square tables scattered around the space. The ice-white tablecloths sparkled against the navy blue-upholstered chairs and bright yellow napkins. Chandeliers hung from the polished wood beams on the ceiling as if they were on an opulent yacht.

  People were sitting around five of the tables. Two all-male foursomes had obviously come in from golf or were at the turn, and one all-women foursome appeared to be the same, with their collared golf shirts and matching skirts. Two mixed-gender couples each sat at other tables.

  Everyone turned and looked at Tiffany as she came in. Sunshine sparkling off the Atlantic Ocean and glowing through the high windows beamed on each one of the white faces, which was like standing on the surface of Jupiter and gazing up at a dozen and a half moons in the sky.

  Tiffany smiled gently, looking non-threatening and like she was supposed to be there. She delicately ripped open the Velcro on the back of her golf glove on her left hand and tugged at her fingertips to remove it, showing them she was a golfer, too.

  Jericho caught up to her, and his face rearranged itself into a rictus of a smile. “Uh-oh.”

  “It’s okay, hon. I’m used to it,” Tiffany murmured to him.

  Jericho was still staring at the people on the other side of the room when he raised his hand in greeting. “The couple in the middle of the room are my parents.”

  Tiffany turned her head and tried not to let her lips move. “We can make a run for it.”

  Jericho’s smile was perfectly frozen, and his Adam’s apple barely bobbed as he said, “Too late. They’ve already seen us. Are you okay with this?”

  “I’m okay if you’re okay. Did you used to do ventriloquism or something?”

  He kept doing it, and his voice was precise even though his lips and jaw did not move. “I went to boarding school most of my life. I am devious in ways you would not believe. I apologize in advance for whatever they say.”

  Jericho didn’t hold her hand as they crossed the wide expanse of the clubhouse.

  Tiffany steeled herself to be fine with whatever Jericho said to introduce her. It wasn’t like they’d been dating for six months or a year. It wasn’t like she was anything other than Miss May.

  When they got over to the table, Jericho’s parents were sitting across the square table from each other, not beside each other.

  Tiffany was going to have to sit between his parents.

  Jericho’s mother was a thin woman who sat very straight in her chair, with finely wrinkled skin a few shades lighter than her pale gray eyes that darted as she looked from Tiffany to her son and back again. His father looked about as tall as Jericho was, with a full head of dark iron hair and a calculating harshness in his blue eyes.

  Jericho slid a chair out from the table and stood behind it, gesturing to Tiffany to indicate she should sit.

  Okay, but Tiffany wasn’t going to read anything into Jericho holding a chair for her, not even when he said, “Tiffany, I’d like to introduce you to my parents, Boyd and Lillian Parr. Mom, Dad, I’d like you to meet Ms. Tiffany Jones.”

  Just her name. No equivocation that she was a woman who worked at one of his golf courses or a person he just happened to be golfing with. Just her name.

  Tiffany’s hands felt quivery like she’d played thirty-six holes of golf in one day. She drew a deep breath and put on her very best code-switched non-accent. “Very pleased to meet you, Mr. and Mrs. Parr.”

  She sounded like every Connectikite upper-middle-class girl she’d known in high school.

  The Look passed between Jericho’s parents, and Tiffany glanced down at her plate to let them have their eyeball-conversation, Oh my God, she’s Black, without her watching them. It didn’t matter if she saw it or not. She’d know the results soon enough.

  A waiter glided over to their table, delivering glasses of water for Tiffany and Jericho and salads for his parents. Jericho confirmed with Tiffany that she wanted the Connecticut-style lobster roll and ordered for the two of them.

  His father ordered another bottle of wine for the table.

  Once the waiter was gone, Lillian Parr asked, “So, where are you from, Tiffany?”

  “Newcastle,” Tiffany said, adjusting her silverware and plate to be even with the edge of the table.

  “Newcastle, England, or Newcastle, here?” his mother asked.

  “Newcastle, here,” Tiffany clarified.

  “No, I mean, where are you from originally?” his mother asked, nodding helpfully.

  Tiffany smiled faintly, trying to give Jericho’s parents the full benefit of the doubt. “My mom is from Newcastle. Her family has been here for generations. The Marines stationed my father at the Navy base in Groton. He went up to Newcastle to go to church, and they met at church.”

  “Oh,” Lillian said, delicately stabbing the lettuce on her plate with her fork. “Jericho usually associates with people he met at that boarding school in Switzerland we sent him to. I thought, perhaps, you were from Le Rosey.�
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  That was a pretty good reason for his mom to doubt where she was from, so Tiffany chalked it up to Jericho’s prior dating habits. “No, we met here. Meaning, in Connecticut.”

  A different waiter brought over the bottle of wine, and Boyd poured glasses for Tiffany and Jericho.

  Lillian encouraged Tiffany to drink up, so she sipped the wine to be sociable. Tiffany was eating a meal and was a tall woman. She could metabolize a glass of wine with food in an hour and be all right to drive, though it was freaking her out a little.

  “And how do you two know each other,” his father stated. Even though Boyd had phrased it grammatically as a question, the growl in his tone didn’t make it sound like a question.

  Just as Tiffany was phrasing an answer, Jericho cut in. “Tiffany is a PGA-certified golf instructor at the golf course I recently bought, Newcastle Golf Club.”

  Boyd’s iron-gray eyebrows twitched. “Did she beat you on the golf course today, Jericho.”

  Again, the structure of Boyd Parr’s verbiage was a question, but it didn’t sound like it was. Tiffany waited to see how Jericho was going to answer that.

  “Absolutely,” Jericho said. “By six strokes.”

  “Six strokes? What happened to all those golf lessons I paid for down at the Croon Academy at the Greens of Grass course when you came home for the summers?”

  “I shot four over,” Jericho told his father, “which would win the Member-Member Tournament here most years. Tiffany shot two under par. She was having an off day. Her handicap is negative three.”

  Boyd Parr set down his fork and looked back at Tiffany, appraising her with a more critical eye. “Yeah, she looks like she’d be strong.”

  The waiter was at Tiffany’s shoulder holding a salad plate, so she concentrated on allowing the waiter to place her salad in front of her rather than the strong comment.

  But she was strong. Nothing wrong with being healthy. Except for her leg.

  Tiffany sipped her wine. A little liquid calm might be helpful.

  “Tiffany is an amazing golfer,” Jericho told his parents. “She would have gone to Q school and tried out for the LPGA tour, except that she had a leg injury. She’d probably beat your foursome by twenty strokes each.”

  “Yeah, we could shoot closer to scratch if we played from the red tees.” His father punctuated the snark by poking a forkful of salad into his mouth.

  “Tiffany doesn’t play from the red tee box. She plays from the tips. So she’d tee up two tee boxes behind where your senior foursome plays from, and she’d still beat you.”

  His father glowered at his salad, so Tiffany went for the compliment to smooth things over. “I think the best thing about golf is how it brings people together. Really, every golfer plays against themselves, not against each other.”

  Boyd Parr huffed, “That explains why I always lose. The only person who could beat me is myself.”

  Tiffany laughed at Boyd’s quip, making sure her laugh was an amused, girlish chuckle rather than a raucous expression of genuine joy like when she was at home or with her cousins. She raised her wine glass to him, and he did the same. She sipped again.

  When she looked up, Jericho was smiling at her like she’d done something brilliant instead of just flattering an old guy. Again, she was a Black woman employed in the golf industry. She knew how to flatter old white men to calm them down.

  Lillian laid her hand on the tablecloth between their two salad plates, an aborted attempt to touch Tiffany. “So, you work at Jericho’s new business venture with Last Chance?”

  “Yes, I’ve been working there for a few years, ever since I graduated from college. It was quite a surprise to us when Jericho bought NGC a few weeks ago.”

  “It was quite a surprise to us when Jericho made that wager such that he had to buy it,” Boyd said. “It’s quite upended his venture capital company’s finances.”

  Wager? “What wager?” Tiffany asked Jericho.

  He waved his hand in the air. “It’s nothing.”

  Lillian asked, “Is that why you two are golfing here today? Are you getting ideas for how you’re going to improve his golf course in Newcastle?”

  “I’m hoping he doesn’t change it too much,” Tiffany said. “NGC is an important part of the community in Newcastle.”

  “But that’s why you’re golfing with him, right? To get ideas for the other golf course.”

  Ah, Tiffany knew what she was asking. “Yes, of course. That’s all.”

  Jericho leaned in and spoke directly to his mother. “No, it’s not just about Newcastle Golf Club. Tiffany and I are here together.”

  “Together?” His mother’s face twitched in a thousand different places, from lip movement quirks around her mouth to flaring nostrils to one eye blinking rapidly in a tic.

  Tiffany hoped she wasn’t obviously staring at Lillian’s facial features flickering through a thousand different micro-expressions, but she was. A face shouldn’t be able to do that. Lillian looked like a speeded-up video or a case of demonic possession.

  “Together?” Lillian asked again. “You mean you’re . . . dating?”

  Tiffany hadn’t thought she was going to get the whole Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner treatment when she’d agreed to eat a lobster roll with Jericho in the clubhouse, but evidently, there they were.

  Jericho settled back in his chair, becoming more solemn.

  Tiffany managed to catch his eye for a moment, and she shook her head a little bit and raised one palm at him, trying to let him know that it was okay if he didn’t want to go down this road with his parents.

  After all, Tiffany was just Miss May.

  And June was on the horizon.

  She looked down and stared at her half-eaten salad with her palm still up, while Jericho’s parents stared at him.

  Jericho took a breath—and she knew it was him taking a breath because he’d inhaled air through his lips into his muscular body beside her ear so many times—and he said, “We’re dating.”

  The salad plate was whisked away from under Tiffany’s nose, and a fresh roll piled high with steaming lobster meat drizzled with melted butter inserted itself under her face.

  “You’re dating?” his mother asked again.

  There was a gorgeous lobster roll under Tiffany’s face, and she resolved not to let it go to waste. Tiffany picked up the oven-warm bread, turned it sideways, and took a healthy bite. She did not, however, look at the three other people at the table.

  “Dating.” The descending tone of Jericho’s voice sounded like he was trying to end the conversation.

  Tiffany took another bite of the lobster roll. Fresh butter coated her tongue, and the tender lobster flesh was infused with it.

  Jericho’s father grumbled, “Well, it was nice that we had to find out this way, but let’s not give the other country club members anything else to gossip about.” Sarcasm permeated his words like springtime fog rolling through the air above a wet fairway.

  Conversation during the rest of the meal was minimal, though Lillian asked a few closed-ended questions about where Tiffany had gone to college and what else she liked to do besides golf.

  Tiffany smiled politely and did her best to answer. Jericho hopped in to praise Tiffany whenever there was an opening, and his father methodically chomped his lobster roll in sullen silence.

  At one point, Jericho’s phone chimed, and he excused himself to peek at it and text back.

  “What was so important,” Boyd stated and asked Jericho, breaking his self-imposed silence.

  Tiffany’s phone played a guitar riff that indicated she had received a text, as Jericho told his father, “Gabriel Fish texted me. He wants to play a round on the golf course I bought and offer advice. I put him off.”

  Boyd scowled. “I wouldn’t take any advice he’ll give you. The Shark is the kind of guy who would sucker punch you when you aren’t looking in order to win the bet. His father was like that, too.”

  Tiffany sneaked a glance at h
er phone screen, hoping her cousins had not tracked her phone to Narragansett so she would have to answer questions.

  Instead, Jericho had texted her, They’re freaking out because they’ve never met anyone I was dating before.

  A chill swept through Tiffany, and her fingers and forearms felt weak again.

  But it was just an accident. They hadn’t had a chance to flee before his parents had seen them.

  After they’d finished eating, Tiffany needed to get the heck out of that dining room. She couldn’t handle not only being the Black girl that their son was dating, but also being the only girl their son had ever dated as far as they knew.

  She stood. “I’ll go check on our golf clubs.”

  Jericho tucked his crumpled napkin beside his plate. “I’ll go with you.”

  His mother hissed at him, “Stay a moment.”

  Tiffany said to his parents, “It was wonderful meeting you both. Thank you for a lovely lunch,” so no one could say she was rude, and she strode out of the dining room.

  Outside, the air was sultry with the late-May New England summer sunshine, and she sucked in a deep breath of the salt breeze from the ocean just beyond the rolling golf course.

  Over by the caddie shack, her golf bag and Jericho’s stood where the caddies had cleaned their clubs and even wiped down their leather bags. The caddies must’ve changed shifts at noon, because two new guys stood next to their bags.

  Summery afternoon sunshine clung to Tiffany’s hair as she walked across the cobblestone courtyard. “Hey, guys, we’re done. I’ll take my clubs now.”

  One of the caddies, a mid-twenties, tall guy stepped between her and her golf bag. He squinted at her, his sunburnt skin gathering in tan and ivory lines around his eyes. “You’re not a member here.”

  “I know I’m not a member here, but that’s my bag right behind you. I’m leaving, and I want my clubs.”

  The guy put his hands on his hips, making himself even bigger. “I don’t think so.”

  From behind the big caddie, the other guy asked, “Royce?”